U.N. Report
I really want to write a proper response to the barrage of articles released in the last couple of days regarding the U.N.’s new report. Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts is a collaboration of over 100 scientists, eight U.N. agencies and the governments of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. I have to stop here for a second and point out that most of those involved with this report – a report that apparently says the effects of Chernobyl were greatly over-estimated – were many of the same agencies that were involved when the disaster happened in 1986. Also, the three governments involved pay out millions of dollars a year to Chernobyl victims and have been trying to reduce this for years.
The vast majority of media coverage on the report has an overwhelming air of relief to it. It also has the stink of lazy reporters who haven’t bothered to do anything more than read the press packet. I find this approach highly irresponsible. The U.S. and Great Britain are both highly likely to begin commissioning new nuclear power plants within the next couple of years. Isn’t it convenient for them that this report was released right now. Everyone can read all about how the big bad nuclear explosion wasn’t really so bad at all. I mean, sure, kids have cancer, but it’s 99% curable. And most of the people who are sick aren’t really sick because of radiation. No way. They’re sick because they think radiation is going to kill them. They’re sick because they got scared by all the overblown reports that their skin was going to fall off and their babies were going to have eight arms. It’s all in their head. Sure, their babies might be born with thyroid cancer, but, remember, it’s 99% curable.
The people that were and are exposed to nuclear radiation should be scared. And so should we. Our President is all for building nuclear plants all over this country again. And now we’ve got media all over the world writing articles simply repeating this propaganda released from the U.N. We’re being told “See, kids, you freaked out for nothing. Only a few people are going to die and the Chernobyl accident was a worst-case-scenario. Also, it was completely the fault of the big bad bureaucratic communist machine that was the Soviet Union.” Right, because first of all, American people never make mistakes. And, if something like that did happen in the U.S. there’d be aid sent immediately by our quick-like-a-bunny right-on-top-of-it government. Or will it?
Americans are naïve. I’m sorry, but we are. We trust our president too much. We trust the media too much. And we’re too damn lazy to do a little research and find out what’s going on. I have been attempting to access the International Atomic Energy Agency’s website for several hours now and have been unable to. For one reason or another, the site is down. But every single article I’ve read regarding the Chernobyl’s Legacy report coughs up the same quotes and the same information. It’s a 600-page report, I understand. And I suppose I don’t expect every reporter to read all 600 pages of it in order to write a 300-word article that will end up on A11. However, couldn’t at least one read it? I’d love to read it. However, I can’t seem to find a copy anywhere on the net. If anyone knows how I can go about getting a copy of the report, please tell me.
If Hurricane Katrina has taught the American people anything, it’s that we absolutely cannot count on our federal government to help us out in times of emergency. Of course, what can you expect, the last job held by Mike Brown, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was Judges and Stewards Commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association. That organization doesn’t exist anymore because Brown ruined it financially and it was forced to become part of the Purebred Registry. This is the man that Bush put in charge of emergencies in our country. But I digress. My point is, the U.S. government isn’t any better about telling us the truth or helping our people out than the communist Soviet government was. Our current government withholds, lies and spins information just as badly as the Soviets ever did. We need to pay more attention or soon the U.N. will be issuing reports telling us that it’s all in our heads.
posted by Sara Ch. at 12:08 PM
5 Comments:
Chernobyl was not a nuclear explosion. It was a reactor that was a case study in how to not build a reactor. It was a reactor that was abused--an experiment was run on it while it was running! It was a steam explosion that was the result of an out-of-control nuclear reaction. Not a nuclear explosion. Big difference.
You're completely correct. I didn't choose my words carefully enough. My point was simply that there was an explosion at the reactor. And I realize that the RBMK is in general a bad design and that reactor #4 wasn't built correctly in the first place. However, nuclear reactors must be made perfectly and I'm convinced that humans are not capable of doing this.
The RBMK was not "in general" a bad design. It was through-and-through terrible. Let's compare it to the state of the art: the CANDU.
CANDU fuel: natural uranium or light-water-reactor nuclear waste in ceramic form (to increase melting point beyond the temperatures achievable in the reactor).
RBMK fuel: bomb-grade uranium metal.
CANDU waste: plutonium-239.
RBMK waste: plutonium-239.
CANDU containment: pressure vessels around fuel rods plus airtight containment.
RBMK containment: tin can with a concrete block on top.
CANDU moderator and coolant: heavy water in separate channels which could easily be mechanically linked.
RBMK moderator and coolant: graphite and light water, respectively, so the reaction would continue in a LOCA.
CANDU control rods: cadmium, ceiling-mounted in case of loss of power.
RBMK control rods: boron carbide, floor mounted.
CANDU controls: automatic with human supervision.
RBMK controls: almost totally manual.
The RBMK is literally a case study in how not to build a reactor. The only good thing about it is that it produces usable materials as waste. Fortunately, better (read: functional) designs exist.
Nuclear reactors don't have to be built perfectly any more than airplanes. They have to be a) designed to minimize impacts, not accidents, b) built to spec, and c) managed correctly, including the whole fuel cycle. The incorrect way we did (a) in most of the world has the positive side effect of preventing our mismanagement of the fuel cycle from having any effects besides the buildup of nuclear waste.
I completely disagree that a reactor doesn't have to be built perfectly any more than an airplane does. Yes, an airplane crash can be deadly, but an accident with a nuclear reactor can cause far greater and longer-lasting damage. Regardless of how well a reactor is designed in theory or how automated the process is, there is still room for errors. And with nuclear materials you just can't make errors.
You miss the point in that the reactor design can create greater margins for error, automated designs can eliminate the human factor that is the cause of most industrial accidents, and improved knowledge and experience can make the overall design not only less prone to component failure but able to absorb more component failures before something happens.
An airplane crash of course can be deadly, but the entire safety program of the FAA and aviation industry for the past 70 years has been to make the inevitable accidents increasingly survivable--basically, to reduce the effects of component failures.
Nuclear power plant designers, on the other hand, have simply put more and more components on their plants to prevent failures from happening in the first place. This approach, however, costs a whole lot more and not only increases the overall chance of a component failure but makes the overall design so complicated that nobody can track everything at the same time. That was TMI in a nutshell. The plant was too complicated, the operators, although theoretically aware of everything, couldn't connect the dots due to information overload, and something was going to fail eventually and did. However, not everything could fail at the same time, and a cascading failure eventually hit an unrelated backup system and stopped.
And no, an explosion at a chemical facility (say, a solar panel factory) that dumps a plume of PCBs, cadmium, lead, industrial acids, and other fun things with infinite half-lives is much worse than a release of nuclear waste, which will eventually be gone if we leave it alone and is actually less toxic (by toxicity threshold in ppm) than many chemicals. With nuclear materials you can make errors up to the point where a toxic dose is released--and when you think about it, that's a fairly large margin.
To summarize, a good design has minimal effect on its environment when it fails. Backups are there to prevent a systemic failure after a component failure.
Engineering Design Process 101 :)
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